When you sleep I can hear you dreaming. Your lips murmur in Russian, a foreign tongue, but the feeling translates. Your angular face softens. Your long mass of body crumples the sheets. You look so innocent I cannot bear it.
In this bed all I see is a boy in a man’s frame. In this room all I feel is a mounting tenderness towards the still center that is your being.
The boy inside you did not know what it meant to be a man. The man you are longs to retreat back to boyhood.
I picture you running into your mother’s fleshy arms, and your face broken by the indent of a smile. I imagine you riding your first bicycle between reddening trees as Fall reclaims the Earth. I think of your father teaching you to fish, patient yet firm.
I wonder when you first registered the sophistication of betrayal. The sudden absence of the mother’s milky breast. The bloody knee when gravity fails you on your beloved bicycle. The silent departure of the father figure. The wounds that time cannot close.
The boy inside you cries easily for what he has lost. The man you’ve become believes nothing can be kept.
Roxanne Noor is a first-generation American currently living naked on an island. Her work can be found in Cathexis Northwest, Nymphs, Sunstroke Magazine, Anti Heroin Chic, Uplift Connect, Nude Studio, Full Potential, and others. Roxanne is involved in the messy brilliance of the human experience while giving space to the wisdom of higher consciousness. Connect with Roxanne here.